The Digital in the Humanities: An Interview with Sharon M. Leon - Los Angeles Review of Books

"Let me start by saying that my entire perspective on this has been deeply shaped by the years I spent with Roy Rosenzweig, who was a very optimistic but practical guy. His willingness to strive for democratic access to materials, to scholarship, to primary sources, to intellectual work, motivates everything that we do at the Center and it motivates my work. I think we have made huge strides in digital work on that front. Now there are millions and millions of open-access primary sources available for the world to use. That level of access has enabled a whole set of other developments in digital culture — the idea of remix culture: that people can take stuff, recombine it, ask their own questions, and do their own work is hugely important. I think to some scholars this is really threatening because it also involves a loss of control over message, interpretation, and authority. But this is just classic reception theory: people are always receiving and making sense out of the material they encounter on their own. And to assume we can control that ever is ridiculous. The other positive thing digital humanities has done is to embrace an open source ethos that has made tools and methods and platforms freely available for people to use. Those tools are now in the world and they are changing the ways that people are presenting their scholarship and the kinds of questions they are asking. More and more, everything is tilting toward open access and open source. We can’t get there fast enough as far as I’m concerned."